Column by Hal Walter
Weather – May 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
LIVING WITH MOTHER NATURE’S manic bouts of PMS has become especially challenging here in the Wet Mountains, where inside of one year we have had both a 300-year drought and a 100-year snowstorm. In Ma Nature’s defense, you’d be a little off balance too if you had holes that big in your O-zone.
The snowstorm I am speaking of was unlike any I have ever experienced — at least 6 feet of heavy, wet snow fell in three days, stranding us at our ranch for four full days. For two weeks after the blizzard water poured steadily off my roof every day, all day, as the snow gradually melted. And when the roof was finally dry, there was still a good foot of compacted and frozen slush left on the ground, lingering well into April.
Although this blizzard was huge and inconvenient by modern-day standards it must be noted that it was barely a blip on the screen as far as catastrophic storms are concerned. For instance, the Donner Party and Frémont’s 4th Expedition weathered much worse storms and strandings without the benefit of electricity, telephones, Internet access, and all the necessary ingredients for a Poulet a la Catalane. It occurred to me during my snow-enforced captivity that not all members of those parties made it out, and also that eating your boots, mules, and friends has generally fallen into disfavor.
All winter the usual seasonal markers first ran late, and then shifted into fast forward pointing toward an early spring. Bluebirds were absent until late February, when some significant snows made me wonder if the tide of drought was indeed turning. Then suddenly the bluebirds appeared, followed shortly by the real harbingers of spring — killdeer plovers and red-winged blackbirds — haunting the creekbeds on the Ides of March. Two days later, St. Patrick’s Monday, it began to snow.
I had business in Pueblo and made a trip there that afternoon. By the time I reached lower elevation in Wetmore it was raining and the landscape had turned green almost overnight. In Pueblo I delivered a CD for printing, and also made a major grocery haul.
By the time I returned home that evening there was enough snow to warrant breaking out a measuring tape — 13 inches. It was extremely heavy and wet, and very difficult to walk through. The storm continued all night while the temperature hovered right around 32 degrees. In the morning there was two feet of something that I would not exactly call snow. Slush might be a better term, though wet concrete might better get across the point that nothing could move in it.
We surmised fairly quickly that Mary would not be going to work that day. I set about digging a road from the house to the gate so that if a plow did happen to come down our road we might have a chance to get my truck out. Total shoveling time that day was seven hours, but when I was done there was a road from our house to the front gate, and my truck was parked there.
[Yard in blizzard]
THE NEXT MORNING my hand-dug road had vanished and it was clear that we truly were stuck and likely would be for some time. Neighbors called and we compared notes. There were reports of some people doing silly things. And the snow kept falling and falling. At times it appeared to fall in sheets like a hard, driving rain. I beat a snowshoe route around the compound in order to accomplish outside chores, giving an especially wide berth to the huge and sinister load perched on the metal roof of my barn.
I also began to worry that a loafing shed on the south side of the barn might collapse under the weight and crush my animals. After several hours of digging, wrestling with corral panels and moving animals around, I was able to get all the animals — four burros, a horse and a mule — safely housed for the night. At one point I tripped on my snowshoes and went down in the snow. For what seemed like several minutes I struggled to regain my feet, wrestling with the ghost of Jack London right in my own front yard.
Heating with wood became a challenge. I probed until I found the woodpile and dug out some chucks of aspen and pine. I was surprised to find that for the most part the firewood had been encased in a snow cave and was actually quite dry. My chopping block, however, was hopelessly below the level of my feet, so I had to improvise. I set a horizontal split log flat-side up on snow that I packed firm with snowshoes, and then used it as a platform to split other logs. All the while I took special care with the ax, keeping in mind that an injury was not likely to be met with swift response from the local ambulance service.
Thursday morning dawned bright and sunny. We began to assess the situation. Though my truck was at the gate it was indeed very much buried again. I decided to make another effort to free it just in case the road crew happened to make a run down our road. As I dug I heard the rumble of heavy equipment and the sound of back-up beepers. With the bright sun reflecting off the snow it felt as if I were at the beach.
I LEARNED LATER from a neighbor who saw it that two graders in tandem with a V-blade made it to within about 2/10 of a mile from our gate before getting stuck. We could hear the sound of the back-up beepers fading in the distance as the graders retreated. I felt not unlike the Tom Hanks character in the movie Castaway, standing there shirtless in my Carhartt shorts, my skin scorching and my grain-hog shovel hanging at the end of my tired arms. I left the truck about halfway free, and snowshoed up the road to see exactly where the county crew had given it up.
Thursday night I went out to check on my animals. The night was crisp and clear, and through the darkness I could hear the sounds of heavy equipment plowing private roads in neighboring subdivisions where the people of money live. Some of us who live on county-maintained roads would just have to wait.
Friday it snowed again, but only a couple of inches. Mary had now missed her entire work week, an absence that was met with the displeasure of her overtaxed fellow nurses. She had me e-mail digital photos of the snow to her office as assurance that she wasn’t making this up. We left out the part about the relaxing time spent sleeping in late, drinking coffee in bed, reading, watching movies and eating splendid meals from the luckily ample and oddly extravagant supply of food and drink. We laughed when anyone phoned in a joke that made reference to the movie, The Shining. We snowshoed to neighbors’ homes and helped dig out a tractor, move horses, replenish coffee supplies, that sort of thing. Outside, late into the night, I could once again hear the sound of heavy equipment in neighboring subdivisions. It seemed almost eerie. Sooner or later a county-owned machine like this would come to our gate and this strange dream would be over.
The first thing I heard when I woke up at 6:30 Saturday morning was a front-end loader somewhere on our road. After breakfast and chores I put on snowshoes and hiked up to see what was going on. The operator hadn’t gotten very far and was actually right where the graders had become stuck on Thursday. I padded on back to the house and started digging around the truck and the last few feet to the road. At 11 a.m. the front-end loader finally arrived at our gate.
We were thankful even though the road was like a tunnel of mud full of giant potholes. A culvert sat perched on a heap of snow, along with piles of dirt that formerly formed the road base. We drove almost immediately for lower elevation. We went running in the snowless desert between here and Pueblo, then drove into that town and went straight to a fairly upscale restaurant so that we might eat something that I hadn’t cooked. The hostess asked if we’d like to sit inside or out on the patio. For some reason I was greatly confused by this question.
After eating and remarking that the food wasn’t as good as anything I had cooked the entire week we were stranded, we went to Home Depot to get a new grain scoop shovel, because mine had cracked under the stress of moving tons and tons of snow. I was told that all such shovels had been shipped back to the warehouse since winter was now over. However at another big-box hardware store called Lowe’s I spied a plastic scoop way up on a scaffolding shelf — and I did not leave for home without it.
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE getting a year’s worth of water all at once. However, as much life as a storm like this brings, the destruction is also profound. Branches hang splintered from the trunks of ponderosa pines. Entire piñons were squashed. I saw the lifeless forms where a herd of antelope perished in the storm on the plain near Westcliffe. As the snow retreats I’m sure we will find other casualties. Materially, our fences are wrecked, there is water damage inside the garage and to the exterior walls of our buildings, and the drywall in our house apparently cracked as the roof flexed under the weight.
People have asked if I think this storm was a drought-ender and I really don’t know. I think it made a serious dent in the problem but I don’t think we are exactly swimming in deep water just yet. As a student of the natural world I had a theory that last year’s thunderstorms never developed because there was insufficient ground moisture to evaporate and feed the cumulus clouds when they attempted to build into thunderstorms. Now that we do have moisture on the ground I see cumulus building already in mid-April. If these clouds actually begin developing into rainstorms the drought cycle may actually break.
Until then, the seasonal markers still seem early. The customary April blizzard apparently came in March. More bird species have made early arrivals. A mourning dove has been cooing in the aspens, and a kestrel falcon has already staked out the dead pine for nesting. The days have been warm and sunny and I have spent hours shoveling slush and diverting water through makeshift ditches away from the driveway and house. The mud is preferable to dust.
Hal Walter lives and writes in the Wet Mountains, which actually lived up to their name in March.